New Nespresso Campaign Celebrates Women’s Contribution to Coffee

Agricultural development is a powerful tool both for economic development and for combatting climate change. Strengthening the role of women farmers would increase economic growth, improve social well-being, ensure sustainable development, and reduce poverty among millions of people.

A new report by Nespresso examines the barriers to strengthening the role of women in coffee farming and identifies opportunities to increase the involvement of women — representing huge potential benefits for communities across coffee-growing regions. To celebrate the contribution of women to coffee agriculture, Nespresso is launching a new campaign featuring several female farmers and farm advisors — also known as agronomists.

In many countries women are lacking equal access to training and support, lessening their potential to play a significant role in coffee production. This is often due to men often owning most of the land and women often having additional responsibilities such as child care and domestic duties.

One of the objectives of the AAA Programme – which encourages farmers to learn sustainable quality practices – is to ensure women farmers have access to this critical knowledge and training that can trigger a mindset shift and behavior change that can positively impact the sustainability of coffee sourcing.

Already, women represent 31% of the 441 agronomists working with coffee farmers worldwide through the Nespresso Sustainable Quality Programme (compared with 15% global average, according to World Bank estimates).

Nespresso has developed a field-tested gender analysis methodology that supplier field teams can use to get a deeper understanding of the gender gap and opportunities to strengthen the impact on women coffee farmers’ participation, learning and economic empowerment.

They are able to collect a wide set of data on farmers including; education and literacy levels, access to transport, views on female trainers as well as comparing how husbands and wives view their roles in coffee farming.

Based on findings from the analysis, Nespresso is implementing new initiatives and processes in the AAA programme across different local communities. All members of the AAA programme, including more than 400 agronomists as well as farmers and community and cooperative leaders will receive new gender sensitisation training to learn about the benefits of increased gender equity and the methods of achieving it. This training will be part of onboarding processes and followed up with regular refreshers.

Additionally, the analysis found many women stated a preference for female trainers, so Nespresso has started tailoring recruitment processes to ensure we attract more women to those positions. The AAA programme will work closely with local communities to tailor recruit initiatives for female agronomists and the roll out of a revised sexual harassment policy to help ensure a safe work environment for women.

Nespresso is investing more than CHF 220,000 to deliver a number of these on the field programmes during this year.

‘‘Gender equality is a critical part of coffee sustainability and something that is an integral part of our AAA programme. We know there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach for the 70,000 coffee farmers of the AAA programme, so we have been working with our partners to find the most appropriate ways to increase the number of female farmers within our programme,” says Daniel Weston, head of sustainability at Nespresso. “For example, to address female farmers not feeling qualified to apply for an agronomist role we have advertised a several-day training course instead of a job offer and found more females were inclined to participate. We are proud to be leading the way in creating initiatives that encourage more women to participate in coffee farming.”

Launched in 2003 in collaboration with the NGO the Rainforest Alliance, the Nespresso AAA Sustainable Quality Programme works with key partners to achieve the programme’s gender equality goals. These partners include TechnoServe, and NGO that works with Nespresso in Africa.

‘‘We work closely with Nespresso to deliver tailored sustainable solutions for coffee farmers. Our field agronomists working in the AAA programme work and live in the field and are able to identify gender sensitive approaches that work for individual communities,” says Myriam Sainz Stuyck, director of strategic initiatives at TechnoServe. “For example, we have seen the presence of female agronomists in certain areas has boosted the participation of female farmers in training programmes.’’

Lausanne, Switzerland-based Nestlé Nespresso SA works with more than 70,000 farmers in 12 countries through its AAA Sustainable Quality Programme to embed sustainability practices on farms and the surrounding landscapes. Launched in 2003 in collaboration with The Rainforest Alliance, the programme helps to improve the yield and quality of harvests, ensuring a sustainable supply of high quality coffee and improving livelihoods of farmers and their communities.

For more information, visit the Nespresso corporate website: www.nestle-nespresso.com.

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